It's quite bad actually. Was issued a very basic work laptop (not really a primary PC). 8GBs probably seemed just fine.

Unfortunately running a browser, outlook, and teams was enough to cause really annoying hickups. I didn't even realize it was my laptop, because I was remoted in somewhere.

I'm more than a little salty that an 8GB PC can no longer run a pretty basic suite of work apps, simultaneously. I guess all three of them have assumed that they will have gobs of memory to themselves.

On the other hand, I'm surprised by how well Macbooks hold up. I just bought a 2017 Macbook 12", a laptop that was criticised for being slow 5 years ago, and it's still fast enough for containerized web development.

A hand-me-down Windows laptop feels like a major setback, but Macbooks are decently fast after years (if the keyboard didn't fail).

This is pure rubbish - a similar spec Windows laptop from the era will run just as well as a macbook.

Sadly, even this is getting harder. I'm running voidlinux on an old 32bit eeepc with 8gb of ram. Mostly, everything is ok for a kids computer except for web browsing. FF simply can't render anything video wise (YouTube, etc), and whilst chromium _can_ I'm unable to get any extensions to successfully block ads. I'm not prepared to let my kids see ads.

Does it have access to all 8gb (because its 32bit)?

Even if so, sounds like a problem with no hardware graphics acceleration to my untrained ear

Specifically, FF ability to use hardware graphics Accel. Like I said, chromium is fine but the trade-off is unacceptable.